Matt Moreles has a fierce desire to serve the region’s diverse community as the new head of the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters.
Born and raised in San Jose, Moreles, 44, attended UCLA majoring in philosophy. He embarked on his career with the county elections office in 2004, was promoted to assistant registrar in 2014 and served as acting registrar for almost a year. His turn at the helm follows the June 2024 departure of former Registrar Shannon Bushey.
Moreles has led efforts to modernize election technology, improve election accessibility and promote public trust through transparency and community engagement.
“I wanted to do something with my life that made an impact, that helped people, that made a difference,” he told San José Spotlight. “Voter registration appealed to me because it’s one of our most fundamental rights. It was attractive to me as a way to help people find their voice … as well as a way for people to hold those in power accountable. I honestly fell in love with the work.”
@sanjosespotlight Matt Moreles has a fierce desire to serve the region’s diverse community as the new head of the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters. Born and raised in San Jose, Moreles, 44, attended UCLA majoring in philosophy. He embarked on his career with the county elections office in 2004, was promoted to assistant registrar in 2014 and served as acting registrar for almost a year. His turn at the helm follows the June 2024 departure of former Registrar Shannon Bushey. Moreles has led efforts to modernize election technology, improve election accessibility and promote public trust through transparency and community engagement. Read our full Q&A with Moreles at SanJoseSpotlight.com. #siliconvalley #bayarea #santaclaracounty #sanjose #vote #voting
♬ original sound – San José Spotlight
Moreles is inspired by people who fought for voting rights as well as those he works with.
“Elections are hard,” he said. “The hours are crazy. There are peak times around the elections, where we’re working seven days a week, long hours. You don’t do that … if you don’t believe in it.”
The interview below delves deeper into his role. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
What are your job responsibilities as Santa Clara County’s new registrar of voters?
Matt Moreles: I oversee all of the operations of the office, making sure we have the resources that we need, that we have a strategic vision about what kinds of elections we want to run. I give mentorship, coaching and training to all of the staff to make sure that they can do the jobs that we need to do.
The registrar of voters conducts all county elections. We do everything related to the elections from federal elections like the presidential elections to local elections like city council, school boards and local measures. If people want to circulate a petition to put a measure on the ballot, we help with that process. When somebody wants to run for office, we help with that process. This particular year, we have five special elections. We always have something going on, which is exciting, but it is also challenging.
How did your experience serving as assistant registrar of voters prepare you for your current role?
I focused a lot on the operations at the vote centers; what kind of services we’re providing, how we’re preparing the technology and also what are our procedures and safeguards in order to make sure that process is as secure and fair as possible. I also oversaw a lot of the vote by mail ballot processing from signature checking all the way through counting the ballots. If we had to do recounts, overseeing that. It gave me a comprehensive view of everything that the office does, and also a detailed level of understanding what the department needs to succeed.
Why did you want to take on this responsibility?
There are a lot of challenges facing the department and I felt I had the skills and the vision and the experience to get us through those challenging times. It is very exciting for me to be able to do as much as I can to make sure that elections in Santa Clara County are successful in the coming years.
We have an extremely diverse community. Most counties don’t support, for example, the number of different languages that we support. We want elections to be fair and equitable, which means that we need a variety of services.
You said you’re committed to enabling all eligible voters to access the voting assistance they need to cast their ballot in a way that best fits their circumstances. How can the registrar of voters ensure all voters have access to an open electoral process?
One of the important things is community engagement and being open to input. Not only are 90% of voters voting by mail, but actually 60% of those who vote by mail are using a drop box. To meet that demand we put drop boxes in more places. That lets us serve areas that might not otherwise have been served. We got some feedback suggesting we work with VTA and Caltrain to set up drop boxes at transit centers. That’s a targeted audience we wanted to make sure we were servicing.
You said it’s critical to promote transparency and safeguard the integrity of elections, so voters have confidence in election results. How can the elections office create more trust among voters?
Making sure that when we’re communicating to the public, it’s not just announcing that we’re certifying the results, but explaining the details of everything that we did to go through and make sure that those results were accurate. We also have very robust advertising and social media campaigns.
What are the greatest challenges facing the elections office?
Public confidence is one of the biggest challenges and the polarized nature of the political atmosphere. As much as we try to put out information about how the process works and reassure voters that the process is accurate, we’re fighting against a lot of misinformation and disinformation. We need to make sure we’re very deliberate with our messaging. A huge part of that is leveraging those community partnerships to further our reach.
The elections office has faced claims of miscounting votes. In 2017, the state’s Joint Committee on Legislative Audit unanimously approved then-Assemblymember Evan Low’s request to investigate the office for counting votes by mail where ballot signatures didn’t match, sending sample ballots missing sections and mailing ballots to individuals ineligible to vote. How do you plan to prevent this?
Before every election, we do very extensive testing to make sure all of our machines are accurate, and we have safeguards in place to make sure nobody’s been able to tamper with them. After the election is run, we have additional checks and safeguards in place before we certify our results.
The Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury released a report (in June 2025) in which they concluded the (registrar of voters) had implemented all of its recommendations. We went back and we looked at our processes, looked at any places where there might be single points of failure and tried to build in redundancies. It feels like a much different place than it was, certainly when I started.
What technological improvements has the registrar of voters made in the last few years?
The biggest change that we made was in 2020. We upgraded our voting system. The equipment is now much more modern, much more user friendly. It has a lot of transparency and auditing tools. We switched to electronic poll books. Back in the old days, you would go to an assigned polling place, and they would have a printed list of all the voters in that precinct. We went to the vote center model, where any voter can go to any vote center in the county.
It also enables us to do things like conditional voter registration, where if you didn’t register by the deadline, then you can come in and vote in person and register all at once.
Any final thoughts?
That impulse to help people and do meaningful work was always there. When I was in college, it started to coalesce in an interest in elections, learning about the history of elections in this country and the various ways elections have been used to uplift people and keep people down. (It) made me realize if I wanted to have an impact, elections were a place to look for that.
Contact Lorraine Gabbert at: [email protected].
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